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Hello, you who stumbled here probably by misclicking on your screen (or had your finger slip on those nifty little tablets). I'm JML, a french gamer that happens to be able to read english (yup, makes me kinda special in a country in which foreign languages are sooo neglected.... nah, just kiddin, i ain't special :'( )

And so i discovered this nice little site which isn't all about big trailers and so on, and actually puts out interesting content. So i figured, why not being a little more active here?

that's pretty much it !

Blog

I barely ever touch my pc for gaming, the main reason being that i am completely useless when playing with a keyboard/mouse combo. I remember playing Counter Strike a long time ago and i couldn't aim to save my life. So i mostly avoid PC games.

When i saw my first trailer for Hotline Miami, i saw very few footage of the game itself. Trailer was about a guy with a pig mask and dead people, which was not a pretty sight but enough to get my attention. After reading some reviews and knowing using the gamepad was a possibility, i decided to give the game a shot.

You play as an unnamed person who receives weird phonecalls that basically mean "go there, kill everybody and get out". Why ? we don't know and our silent protagonist will never begin to tell . So the game starts out as a routine : you wake up in your apartment, get a phone call and clean out a place of people who appear to mainly be russian mobsters. Then you get back to your car, run some errands and repeat this another day.

The game is played with a top down view. At the start of every level, you get to pick which animal mask you are going to wear. Other than the fact that you are harder to recognize this way, those masks, except the rooster mask with which you start out, give you different abilities that help you complete your tasks (or give you some kind of handicap in some cases.) After choosing your mask, you'll jump right into the action : you get to brutally murder any people in the place you're sent to. Most often you'll start out empty handed , and so you'll have to punch an enemy to take his weapon . The one hit kill rule applies to your enemies but to you also, so the game is all about planning your attacks to take out those who stand in your way before they realize they are going to die.

The game is fast paced , which allows you to go all fast and furious but going this path often results in being caught by surprise with a well placed shot from an enemy which you didn't spot at first. So you got to juggle between outbursts of assault and strategic use of the top down perspective coupled with the fact that you can take a look further on the level to know enemy placement and plan your route accordingly.

This mix of intense action and fast thinking coupled with an arcadey formula of combos and scoring makes for an action packed , highly replayable game. The meatboyish die and retry mechanic allows you to experiment different tactics to clear rooms filled with dumb mobsters, attack dogs or more tanky opponents. As the game itself says, enemies are predictable, but a combination of different types of enemies might force you to improvise or take more risks that you originally intended to, which often results in you getting killed and thinking of a new plan as you hit the restart button for another try.

The retro style of the graphics allows for much violence to be displayed without being too shocking but the executions and deaths are still really graphic. The environments have this dirty look, even being so simple looking... the only game i felt had dirtyer environments was the original silent hill. You can easily picture these filthy places where you unleash the carnage.Even the mansions you will cut through have this feeling of unease, especially after you're done, of course...

The Story of the game is , for me , the surprising point : although it is not really told through narration, it is really interesting and mysterious, intriguing.You get an extract from a newspaper there, some dialogue with eerily similar cashier guys, increasingly bizarre encounters. The levels themselves tell a lot of things about our protagonist, even though he never speaks a word. The colorful haze surrounding the levels, the flashes induced by each kill , all of this implies he is high as all hell. Another thing implying this , at least IMO , is the cool music playing in the levels when you're going after each and every one of the enemies. (The soundtrack is just fantastic, probably one of the best things in the game). After you kill the last one, the music immediately stops and some static , creepy sound kicks in as you get back to your car , taking a last look at the horrors you've commited, as if the character was in a drug induced power trip with bumping music in his head while killing everybody around, and then, as soon as the last foe is taken out, he comes down hard and has to face the reality of what he commited. The fact that he pukes after his last kill in the prologue might also give weight to this possibility.

In the end, Hotline Miami is an addicting , fast paced and intense action game with a lot of replayability , and a story that might make you wanna come back to it in order to understand it a little better with knowing what is next to come.

The good

- Fast paced, smooth gameplay

- Awesome soundtrack

- intriguing story

-Replayability

The bad

- the fact i had to wait a pretty long time after my purchase so the game's glitches got sorted out in order to allow me to progress through the game.

When Silent Hill HD collection was announced , being a fan of the series since i played the demo of the first game that was bundled with metal gear solid, i was thrilled . But in the end , it ended up being only SH 2 and 3 that were graphically updated , which was a pretty solid disappointment. While they are good games, they did not need to be remade as much as the original episode.

Of course there was SH Shattered memories , but it was more of a retelling of the events of Silent Hill, a whole different game, playing differently. What Silent Hill needed was to be graphically updated, the voice acting remade , the cutscenes played out in a much more dynamic way !

don't get me wrong , to me the original Silent Hill is still a fantastic game. It struck fear in my heart much more efficiently than any other game. I was even afraid of getting out of a room where i knew i was safe, knowing some unbelievable horrors expected me in the dark. Akira Yamaoka was on point too with chilling tunes that could switch from creepy background noise to high pitched hellish sounds. The places were also perfect for a creepy adventure : Midwich School, Alchemilla Hospital ... all of these felt very strong and the hospital even spawned many offsprings. And it was also a time when nurses where grotesquely deformed hunchbacked abominations instead of skankyly clad horrors !

And remembering this game makes me thing that a lot of younger players are missing out on the genesis of the series, they are missing out because they might be turned off by the sub par graphics, acting and storytelling. I am not trashing the original game by saying this, and i could still play it with great pleasure, but giving it a second life with new graphics and a story that feels much more dynamic and simply alive could be a nice step in getting the series right back where it belongs. although i rather liked homecoming and will be taking on Downpour very soon, it saddens me to see the series getting trashed right and left, so what better way to get a new spark of life than going back to the beginning and get a feel of how it all started?

And you? Do you also wish to plunge back into the fog that started it all? let me know !

This'll be the final part of my observation of how the different Sega franchises have fared since the golden days of what used to be Nintendo's biggest rival. sadly i'll overlook many a franchise because i simply don't know about them enough to be able to speak the right words. I won't speak about Shenmue either. While being one of my greatest gaming experiences , the context around this game is very "tragic"... it cost a lot of money , and while being a masterpiece, it simply and sadly didn't make enough money compared to what it cost to realize. And when it's creator told his vision of the ending of the story quite recently, it probably crushed our last hopes of ever seeing a new and final entry to the series to conclude this story.

So i'll talk about a game and a franchise that i'll probably remember forever in each case.

Many of you probably won't agree with me on this one , but in my opinion, The original Toejam & Earl is the best coop game of the 16 bit generation. of course i did not have a SNES at the time so i might not be able to compare efficiently to what was proposed at the time, but what i know is that i still consider it to be one of the best coop experiences i have ever played. The premise is pretty simple. Toejam & Earl are two aliens who are on their way back to their planet, Funkotron. As Earl pilots recklessly through an asteroid field, their ship is hit and they crash on the weirdest, most dangerous planet around : Planet Earth. From here , the game begins.

You have a choice to make in the beginning : Do you want to play through pre determined levels or randomly generated ones? the principle of the game is to : 1 - reach the elevator that will get you to the next level and 2 - in certain levels, find the scattered pieces of toejam & earl's spaceship , in order to rebuild it and get the hell out of earth.

The game presents itself with a top down perspective and is based on exploration. the basic commands allow you to walk discreetly in order to not alert the dangerous earthlings, reach your inventory and look at the map . Pretty simple huh? but there's a lot more to come !

Basically , Toejam & Earl are totally defenseless against the horrible people of earth , but there is a lot of things to be collected around to help you against them : food , dollar bills and most of all , Christmas presents. Those presents come in many different form, and each of them has a special effect that you will discover when you'll use it for the first time. From the moment you used a certain present , all the similar presents you will find further along the way will have the same effect. Problem is, all the presents do not always have effects that will advantage you ! you can get a speed up to flee your enemies easily of wings to get around an obstacle as easily as you can make an enemy appear out of the blue or lose a life instantly ! The element of randomness made it so you did not abuse the presents unless you were forced to , because doing so could save you or kill you just the same !

Same went for the food , you could either be granted some life , but also lose some if you ate the wrong kind of food (tip : junk food is most appreciated by these aliens).

This game is okay on single player mode. You get to choose your character between the weaker but faster toejam and stronger but slower earl. But the game is taken to a whole bigger dimension played by 2 players. Cooperation becomes key : You can not get to the next level without your buddy , so helping him out is a much better idea than doing everything on your own. Of course you have to separate thus splitting the screen for better exploration of the levels, but sticking together has many advantages : the most evident being the fact that if you use a present while on the same screen as your partner , the effect of said present is shared by both the characters , positive or negative. This makes discovering the effects of the presents and using them appropriately all the more crucial. But that wasn't the only coop aspect of the game : you could share your life with your friend if he needed a boost by high fiving him , you could even give him one of your lives to bring him back from the game over. The game rewarded minute exploration, risk taking but it could punish you just as hard. Notably, the levels being sorts of platforms , you could be pushed out of the ground and drop down one level , separating you from your buddy. The harsh decision had to be made then : did you drop down to help out your falling comrade or did you patiently wait for him to handle the situation?

The game was hard , counting 25 levels with gradually harder enemies, some of which you had to have the best presents in the game to get away from. Some of them were extremely vicious (the infamous Mail box bastards... oh the infamy) and could kill you in mere seconds. The graphics were decent while repetitive , the music was funky , the gameplay was on point... great experience all around.

So what did sega and the developers do ? yep, they completely changed the formula and made the sequel a sidescrolling platformer.

back on planet funkotron, T&E discover that earthlings have infiltrated their spaceship and are now threatening the peace on funkotron.

Now i'll be honest, i didn't play this game for long , and never on coop. but boy was i disappointed. The exploration , the fun... twas gone, twas all gone :'( Transformed into a basic platformer which i could not bear to play more than a few minutes before being bored out of my mind.

There was a third attempt at the franchise much later, which was first made for dreamcast and then transferred to X box

I don't really know anything about it except for the fact it was poorly received by the critics and did not sell well.

By giving up on the formula of the original game, i felt that what made it special was killed and never to be seen again. It could have been another exploration game but bigger, faster, with improved graphics , but instead was transformed into a sidescroller, which killed its originality . And so the magic of the first episode was lost...

what a better way to finish a blog about sega than to talk about Sonic the Hedgehog?

Once a loved and respected hero of video games, He brought speed and excitement on the platform genre, went toe to toe with Mario and gave him more than a run for his money. Sonic was on top of the video game world during the genesis era. He was and his still one of my favorite video game characters of all time. The 4 main Sonic games on the genesis are , as a whole, my favorite games . I can easily start a game and finish it with the same pleasure. Sonic CD is also part of these great game, although it took a different approach to the game , putting more emphasis on exploration.

But Sonic's not dead , isn't he? well, technically, compared to the other franchises i talked about , yeah he's totally alive. But even if i don't share this opinion, for many people , Sonic died some time ago.

After the genesis glory , Sonic passed on a saturn game (except for Sonic R... and huuuh... yeah... let's not talk about this), and so he came back for Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast. For me, SA was a great game. It didn't have the depht of Mario 64 , but for a Sonic game it worked perfectly ! While M64 was about exploration and carefully crafted platforming , SA was about speed , impressive set pieces and dynamic gameplay. A lot of people looked down on SA compared to M64, but a sonic game could not have been made the same way a mario game is made, simply because , despite the fact they were pitted against each other, their respective strenghts were soooo different. SA proposed a scenario that was uncovered as you play from each of the 6 characters point of view. Each character had it's own gameplay : Sonic was about speed and platforming, Tails would race to the end of the level against sonic or another opponent, Knuckles had to explore his levels to find pieces of the master emerald, Amy had to escape an invincible robot , Omega played like a shooting game, and then there's big and his fishing mini game... Not everybody like some of these sides of the adventure . But overall, to me it was a perfect Sonic game.

Then SA 2 came along , introduced Shadow and Rouge, a cool story , limited the gameplay to three different types of levels , and dropped the adventure parts in between the levels. For the first time , you got to play as Dr Robotnik ! It improved on SA and was , IMO, another great sonic game.

And from there, the opinions started to get harsher on the following games. Sonic Heroes followed , it proposed a different gameplay , with teams of 3 characters , each with it's own special ability, designed to get through the obstacles by taking advantage of each characters capacities. I thought it was a good enough game but it could easily have dropped at least one of the teams (or even two) and made their adventures different. Because playing the same levels with 4 different teams got a little stale quickly... in the end the game was good, but not as good as SA1 -2 and a little too repetitive...

Then begins what is, for me , the trilogy of doom , With Shadow the Hedgehog. Yup, he's not sonic but it played the same way as the recent sonic games. The vehicles added NOTHING, the weapons added nothing too... and having to finish the game so many times... my god why? The branching paths system was a cool idea, but some of the objectives felt like chores, and putting so many different endings to finally unlock the real final boss and true ending... i could never do it . The game itself played decently but it was nothing special... in the end, not a very positive experience.

2nd came Sonic the Hedgehog 2006... glitchy, slow, with painful sections of gameplay, botched "amigos" sections... i won't piss on the story, even though the Sonic love story with some bullshit princess was idiotic , but jeez... i really had to be a sonic fan to stomach through this. Silver's gameplay tried something but in the end it fell flat, and fighting him as a boss was terrible too...

and 3rd was Sonic Unleashed... and nope, it's not because of the werehog levels. I know they did not fit all that well in a sonic game but at least they were decently made, although quite repetitive. For me they worked as a change of pace and had some interesting ideas. no, i had much more of a problem with the "Sonicky" sections. They felt way too fast for the gameplay's own good. You could speed through the levels and miss half of the hidden things in the level. and you HAD to get the freaking medals to unlock the next levels... so you had to go back and be careful where they were to get them... playing exactly the opposite way these levels were meant to be played !

With a lot of bottomless pits that were not always signaled , these levels felt painful... it was either speed through the levels and miss everything or don't and get bored to death... I really wanted to like it but i just could not finish it when i had to look for these god damned medals once again... it had the potential but honestly it had too many flaws to put Sonic back on the right tracks.

So, is everything grim for the blue blur? I wouldn't say so , as Colors , Generations and even Sonic 4 ep 2 felt like steps in the right direction, especially Generations , which mixed cool old school gameplay and polished 3d sections, which allowed you to finally enjoy your speed while proposing some interesting platforming sections. S4 Ep 2 improved on the much critiqued S4 ep 1 too. i found ep 1 to be decent but the physics and the fact that they lazily reused whole level designs and bosses.... it was disappointing. S4 ep 2 was quite lazy on level design too, since they basically mixed two former levels to create new levels each time (sandopolis- oil ocean , icecap - carnival night for instance) but they took the time to create new bosses. And playing the game felt right !

To me, Sonic is slowly getting back on the right direction. It needs to build on the more recent games and improve on them, not rush any new game, and take a page out of Nintendo's book and lovingly craft the games made around their most recognized character .

So, will Sega ever revive these games, franchises that some of us have loved in our youth? given the state they're in right know , i doubt it. Given the fact that some of the new franchises they try to launch are not that much supported, i really doubt we're ever gonna see new games from old franchises. Even a HD remake of some of them would be appreciated in my case, but even that is doubtful... time will tell !